BLUE has never been a company to follow the “me-too” appearance policy to which many gear manufacturers adhere. Their mics look different, so it’s only natural that their other hardware looks different, too. And Robbie, the company’s discrete class-A tube preamp, is one cool looking customer — no one will mistake this for an average, everyday preamp.

Robbie’s glowing ECC88 tube protrudes into a bay window on the left of the front panel. To the right is a large backlit gain knob. The only other thing on the front panel is a 1/4" instrument level input jack.

Everything else lives around back, which is just as spartan as the front panel. There are five switches: polarity reverse, 20dB pad, mic/inst input selector, phantom power on/off, and power. If you choose to rackmount a Robbie or two using the optional adapter, then the back-panel location of those controls will likely be a problem. An XLR mic in, XLR line out, and locking AC jack for the external power supply round things out. When you plug Robbie in, the tube enters "standby" mode, sort of like a guitar amp, so it's warm and ready to go.

IN USE

There’s one word that can be used to describe using Robbie: simple. Plug it in, turn up the gain. Maybe set a switch or two. That’s it. There are no metering nor even an overload light on Robbie — you’ll just have to use your ears to detect distortion, or watch the levels in your recorder. Given that the preamp is spec’d with 34dB of headroom, you’ll probably overload the next stage in your recording chain before you do Robbie.

BLUE aimed Robbie at pure, audiophile quality, using no integrated circuits. There’s discrete components from input to output, with ultra low-noise metal film resistors, polystyrene caps, electronically balanced input and output stages, and, of course, the ECC88 twin-triode tube gain stage.

The result of the use of those discrete components is a round, fat sound without hype on the top or bottom. On vocals, Robbie fills in the bottom nicely. The midrange is full but not overly present. Tracks recorded through Robbie tend to sit right where they should in the mix. I found no need to EQ the mids to tame harshness.

The top end is smooth and detailed, without being hard or “spitty.” On one male vocal passage, Robbie smoothed out the excess sibilance perfectly. All the detail and clarity was there, but the “s’s” weren’t over-emphasized.

On acoustic guitar, both nylon and steel-string, I was thrilled with Robbie’s top end — it was open and clear, very natural sounding. You could easily hear fingers on strings and fret/string contact, and harmonics rang clear and true. I feared Robbie’s low end might make acoustic guitars sound boomy or muddy, but this wasn’t an issue. The lows were full, but stayed tight and “real.”

MORE THAN JUST A PRETTY FACE

I found Robbie to be an excellent complement to solid-state designs like the Focusrite ISA series, as well as to Neve/Neve-clone designs. It has a clean, unique sound that blends well, sits well in a mix, and doesn’t strain to achieve clarity and presence. At $1,300 per channel retail, it sits in the mid-price range for tube preamps, but it performs like it costs much more.

Yes, Robbie looks cool. But it also delivers excellent audio quality. An outstanding combination.